All posts tagged ‘game of life’

So, last week I shared some thoughts about sequels and expansions inspired by Risk Legacy, the idea that they exist because of our human tendency to want more of the same. We want change without too much change: rewards without risk, so to speak. But because we can’t agree on the desired degree of change, we get into very passionate debates: why was Phantom Menace such a disappointment to some people? A large part of that has to do with our expectations. If J. K. Rowling decides to write another series of books, you know there will be endless arguments about whether it’s as good as Harry Potter, and so on.

But that was last week’s conversation. This week I want to focus on something else: what makes a game “fair”? Does a game need to be fair to be fun? What does our taste in games say about ourselves?

During my first game of Risk Legacy, I won pretty handily. I started off in Greenland, spread across North America fairly rapidly, and my hold on the continent was never strongly challenged — which meant I got 5 bonus troops every turn, not an insignificant number. By mid-game I’d also taken South America (another 2 bonus troops). One opponent, trapped between two others, got wiped off the board quickly and re-established a base in Australia. For whatever reason, I was more insulated from much of the warfare, and this allowed me to amass enough troops to just Sherman March through any direction I pleased.

After Christmas, my parents, my brother, his wife, and their four kids all came to Connecticut, so the southern part of my family could experience a snowy Christmas. (This seemed like a good idea in August, long before anyone knew the snow would be general over the US this winter.) Given the realities of travel, blended families — not to mention families that almost never see one another, there were times when the kids were tired, and my parents turned to the magic of iPod Touch apps to get them through until dinner.

In particular, my kid liked the Game of Life, which he’d never seen before. When they left, and the app was no longer installed on any available iOS devices, and there was no chance of a post-Christmas board-game run to Target (to be fair, he didn’t even ask), he took matters into his own hand, and made his own game in about 45 minutes.